Saturday, August 15, 2009

Inglourious History


Quentin Tarantino is well known for his love of bloodletting: films such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Kill Bill (vol. 1 2003, vol. 2 2004) are chocked full of violence. So it should come as little surprise that his latest project, Inglourious Basterds - due for release on 21 August - features "a group of Jewish-American soldiers... [who] ambush and kill Nazi patrols, desecrating their corpses whilst leaving one alive to tell others," according to The Hollywood Reporter. Tarantino is quoted as saying that the film is a "spaghetti-western but with World War II iconography."



Inglourious Basterds alludes to Enzo Castellari's 1978 movie of the same name (but conventional spelling), though Tarantino's work is apparently a new story and not simply a remake. (Castellari's film follows a group of American soldiers who are on their way to prison for various infractions, try to escape to neutral Switzerland, but inadvertently end up on a secret mission to steal Nazi technology with the help of the French Resistance.)

Even prior to the film's release, there is plenty to talk about. There is, of course, the question of Tarantino's use of stylized - dare we say Homeric? - violence. But the question that that first came to my mind upon seeing the trailer was that of history. So far as I know, the United States never organized Jewish units during World War II. This is in contrast to the British, who recruited the Jewish Brigade and the Special Interrogation Group from among Jews, primarily - though not exclusively - from Palestine. Both saw action in North Africa, and the Jewish Brigade (along with Arab elements of the Palestine Regiment) saw service in Italy. Though members of the SIG disguised themselves as German soldiers - an action which put them outside the Geneva Convention - their goals were basic commando objectives, not terror. After the war, some members of the Jewish Brigade formed assassination squads that hunted down German officers, some of whom claimed to belong to the fictitious Tilhas Tigiz Gesheften, to allow themselves to travel more easily around occupied Germany. However, none of this extracurricular was sanctioned by the British, much less the Americans. (Remember, the British Empire itself was the target of militant Zionism.)

I have been reading through OSS files in the National Archives lately. Though this American outfit has a reputation for playing dirty, and engaged in its fair share of black propaganda and covert operations, I have been surprised by the extent to which OSS insisted that its operations be conducted on the up-and-up. Interrogation manuals read about like business interviews, without so much as an elliptical reference to coercive methods. One series of memos I encountered mooted the idea of OSS special forces posing as civilians - as Tarnatino's characters do - but the idea was rejected for two reasons: (1) It would place American soldiers outside the bounds of the Geneva Convention. Our enemies had violated the Convention on plenty of occasions, but did also follow it from time to time - downed airmen in Germany, for example, were well-treated - but American leaders insisted that we play by the rules, in the hopes that prisoners might receive fair treatment. (2) There was a keen sense from American leaders that we would lose the moral high ground and could not pass judgment on our enemies if we violated the laws of war.

I think it safe to say that Tarantino has not taken a historical story and simply changed a few names, nor has he even imagined a plausible historical scenario which might have happened, but did not. He has made up a story which runs contrary to the facts of history on several key points. I am inclined to take offense at this not so much as an American - whose side is made to look bad, even morally equivalent to its Nazi opponent - but even more as a historian. Is the past simply a malleable thing we can reconfigure to fit our narrative needs? How many people will view this film and conclude that the war was more or like this (even while acknowledging that the details are fictional)?

Some might argue that Tarnatino is reaching deeper than simple facts and revealing the fundamental truth that war is hell. This is true to a point, but failing to make any kind of distinctions can be dangerous. Vindictive brutality on both sides was the rule on the Eastern Front; it was the exception in the West. War may be hell, but there is no reason to make it more hellish: that is why a great many nations have not only agreed to laws of war, but even follow them more often than not.

But even aside from these particular questions, is Tarantino's use of history licit? Is history a mere assemblage of names and dates, the re-writing of which only constitutes a kind of white lie? Or does that assemblage contain a kind of deeper truth, which is obscured and violated by changing too many details?

Ultimately the question is that of fiction: What are its bounds? How closely must it conform to "reality"? Fiction reveals certain truths by imagining situations that have not existed, to gain greater perspective on those that have, or will. This is the basic premise behind the fantasy genre. But I worry Tarantino may be blurring the line between history and fiction in a dangerous way that is not faithful to either. But perhaps the jury should remain out until after 21 August.

5 comments:

Mike said...

In the popular narrative, history is always whitewashed, tinted, slanted, etc. In my own life, I've heard some very curious and widely accepted comments about events I witnessed in the 80's and 90's. Most of what you hear about those times is only partially true, from what I can see. I don't know if a "clean" historical narrative is ever really possible.

But as for your larger question regarding filmmaking, the same critiques and questions are often raised every time Oliver Stone releases an historically-inspired film. I've heard them described as surreal explorations of cultural identity and also as blatant attempts to mislead the youth of America. JFK, Nixon and Bush have all been treated with a bizarre mix of reverence and hatred by Stone, and more than a few people I know think of those films as having great insight into their subjects' respective characters. And really, how many people allow their impressions of Roman politics and history to be influenced by Shakespeare, who was most certainly not a historian?

Tarantino is a sensationalist, to be sure. His work is generally a stylized pornography of violence-- which is something I say as a half-compliment. A couple of his films are so well-made that they're quite admirable. That is, they're so shallow that they achieve a sort of depth. I'm very curious to see what happens when he stirs up the already muddy waters of historical fiction. Whatever it is, I'm sure it will look very edgy and cool up on the screen.

Aaron Linderman said...

Mike, I think you're spot on to describe Tarantino's work as "so shallow that they achieve a sort of depth." Kill Bill is a great example, a film that smacks (rather loudly) of the old pulp genre, looking a good bit like Indiana Jones meets a Kung Fu movie. Except it also has profound meditations on things like the meaning of the family.

What I'm wondering about is how that approach will translate into a more historical work. Kill Bill includes a sword-wielding Chinese-American-Japanese queen of the Tokyo underworld, who got her start knocking people off in places like El Paso. It's a such a strange mix of cheesy gore, anime, swordplay and western, that one would be hard pressed to take it seriously on a literal/historical level. His new topic seems much more akin to the work of Shakespeare - indeed one who played fast and loose with historical details - than earlier films.

Aaron Linderman said...

Some more follow-up:

This trailer suggests that Tarantino is in fact sticking with his usual over-the-top pulp formula, telling a story about far more than some extra-vindictive Americans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AtLlVNsuAc

Some time around the third grade, I remember writing a series of short stories about a World War II hero. In one of them, our hero - a fighter ace - shot down a Nazi plane, only to see Hitler bail out. He had, apparently, shot down the greatest Nazi of them all. When my father pointed out that Hitler was not a pilot, I was a little perturbed: who cares? a minor detail, right?

Sneaking into a gala full of top Nazis, so as to assassinate all of them, is a pretty over-the-top plot element, of the kind that even a casual World War II buff would find suspect with regards to historical veracity. Which is a good thing: it allows us to sit back and enjoy the show, kind of like the silly fountains of blood that squirt all over the place in Kill Bill (or Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

* * *

A colleague of mine in the field of history has called into question (via our Facebook feed) my claim that "vindictive brutality... was the exception in the West". He notes, for example, that "the Allies were the combatant to employ terror bombing to its greatest effectiveness". Point taken.

Two distinctions may be in order, to clarify the point. Whatever the horrors of the Combined Bomber Offensive - and I do not deny that they were many, and endured by civilians - death from the air happens at a distance. It is, in that way, sanitized; it has been made part of a large, mechanistic system. This doesn't make it right, but it does make it easy. You can bomb the Germany people into submission when you're full of anger and don't have to see the innocent children harmed. But a second kind of vindictiveness happens at close quarters: you look the victim in the eye and deal out pain and suffering while watching it endured. This takes a far greater callousness of soul, I would contend. This too happened on the Western Front, as my colleague has pointed out, though I would contend that most of the vindictiveness in the West was of the former type, not the latter.

A second distinction would be this: Some crimes include perfidy, others do not. Most of us have only encountered the term "perfidy" in archaic usage, when some knave is described as "perfidious". But it is, in fact, a technical term. It means behaving in such a way as to suggest to the enemy that he has rights or obligations under the laws and practices of war which you do not intend to afford him. Approaching the enemy under a white flag - and thereby imposing upon him an obligation to cease hostilities - only to use this cessation to ambush him, is an example of perfidy. Likewise, making use of enemy uniforms or civilian clothing is a crime of perfidy. So far as I know, perfidy was quite rare among Americans (whereas the Germans, for example, employed captured American uniforms at the Battle of the Bulge).

* * *

In reading up a bit about the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, one of the most bitter fights on the Western Front, I discovered that after the war, veterans of the American 4th Infantry Division erected a monument to the memory of a German lieutenant, Friedrich Lengfeld. Lengfeld died of injuries sustained while trying to help a wounded American escape from a minefield. (It is believed to be the only memorial for a German soldier placed by his former enemies in a German military cemetery.)

I always find it striking that, in the midst of such carnage and inhumanity, these kind of moments occur. One cannot expect every film or book to include them; there is simply too much to include. But I find them a refreshing counterpoint to the many instances of man's inhumanity to his fellow man.

Stephen said...

We seem to have a problem with German spam...

Aaron Linderman said...

Spam be gone!